If you store larger volumes of files or customer data, your business is always at risk of a data breach or ransomware attack. If you can save your business from being encrypted, the second hurdle comes with meeting the compliance for your industry, as well as the companies you serve. For businesses working in the SF Bay Area, it’s our responsibility to assist in the various data-protection regulations that cost companies money or reputation.
In this blog, we will discuss the key elements to building your next backup strategy:
1. Determine What Frequency Fits YOU
Most of the time, businesses have a hard time finding a starting point when it comes to disaster recovery and data retention. First, you will need to define how often you should back up based on industry attacks or the amount of data you’re hoping to save. Does it depend on the volume of data that your end-users produce? To maximize both your investment backing up data every 24-hours has become the minimum for most industries, with once a week slowly dying out. Planning today for the worst, especially when coughing up large amounts of money for ransomware payments, is no guarantee that you get your data back.
2. Can Your Backups become Automated
Don’t leave a margin for error to occur. Forgetting to run a backup device has no excuse! If you’ve made the mistake of losing large volumes of data or forgot to run your backup rest-assured in knowing, most enterprise-grade backups work to fix the “human error,” by automating the process entirely.
3. Data & Backups Can Scale
In the past, scaling infrastructure was cumbersome and difficult. To avoid the headaches, companies have begun safeguarding data by taking several routes to backup data. With ransomware becoming more prevalent with encrypting backup devices, a single copy for many larger organizations simply won’t be enough.
Having local on-premises backups (accessible faster) works great when paired with storing data in the cloud. Many businesses have begun this process. Do you really know where all these copies reside? Does your business have a fail-safe strategy in place for fast recovery?
4. Avoiding the Trial by Fire Mindset
I’m sure many of you have heard that practice makes perfect, but regularly testing backups and monitoring their alerts daily has become commonplace in today’s connected landscape. One of the many famous stories surrounding backup incidents can be found no further than Pixar’s California Office in Palo Alto, CA.
“Back in 1998 the developers at Pixar were creating the movie, Toy Story 2. An animator working late on file cleanup entered a command that accidentally deleted almost all the production files. Recalling the backups taken every day, the animator didn’t panic. However, when the team went to recover the files after coming in the following day, they found a solution that was no longer working. This was in 1998, so the amount of time needed to properly test these solutions was far greater, and the procedures have quickly become streamlined. In a sudden turn of events, the technical director for the movie had an offsite backup they used to restore the footage and bring the $100,000,000 Doller film to market.”
This story highlights one of the MOST common ways a business suffers from not having a backup solution. Building a solid strategy should be mission-critical to businesses. Bring together your solutions arsenal and align your backups, ransomware protection. Staying protected from such attacks as ransomware 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year can be tough, but making sure your business is prepared cannot be ignored. Learn a better methodology to alerting your staff of backup success and status.
